Eliot attributed much of his early style to the French Symbolists, and took from them their ability to infuse poetry with high intellectualism and a sensuous language, while developing his new and original style. His early works, like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land, draw on a variety of cultural reference to depict a modern world in ruins yet beautiful and meaningful. Eliot uses techniques like pastiche and juxtaposition to state his ideas without having to argue them explicitly; Eliot’s early poetry has poetic innovations and develops characters who fit the type of the modern man as seen by his contemporaries.
After his conversion to Christianity Eliot’s poetry
changed. The later poems emphasize depth of analysis over breadth of allusion; the
tone is more hopeful. The experiences of World War II inform the Quartets, which address issues of time,
experience, mortality, and art. The quartets do not lament the ruin of modern
culture nor seek redemption in the cultural past, as The Waste Land does, human limits are overcome through
art and spirituality.
Eliot’s poems show many unifying aspects: all of
Eliot’s poetry is marked by a conscious desire to bring together the
intellectual, the aesthetic, and the emotional in a way that honours the past
and acknowledges the present. Eliot is always conscious of his own efforts, and
he frequently comments on his poetic endeavors in the poems themselves.
The Damaged Psyche
of Humanity
Eliot wanted to express the fragile psychological state of humanity
in the twentieth century. The passing of Victorian ideals and the trauma of
World War I challenged cultural ideas of masculine identity, and artists
questioned the romantic literary ideal of a visionary-poet capable of changing
the world through verse. Modernist writers wanted to capture this transformed
world, perceived as fractured, alienated, and denigrated. Europe lost an entire
generation of young men in the Great War, causing a crisis of masculinity as
survivors struggled to find their place in a deeply changed society. The
aftershocks of World War I contributed to the dissolution of the British
Empire. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and wounded, culture as crumbling and
dissolving. Humanity’s damaged psyche prevented people from communicating with
one another, an idea that Eliot explored in many works, including “A Game of
Chess” (the second part of The Waste Land) and
“The Hollow Men.”
The Power of
Literary History
Eliot showed great reverence
for myth and the Western literary canon, and his work is
full of allusions, quotations,
footnotes, and scholarly exegeses. The Waste Land juxtaposes
fragments of various elements of literary and mythic traditions with scenes and
sounds from modern life. The effect of this poetic collage provides a
reinterpretation of canonical texts and a historical context for his
examination of society and humanity.
Infact Eliot considered the
literary tradition very important , and in his opinion the best writers write
with a sense of continuity with the writers who came before, as if literature
constituted a stream.
The Changing
Nature of Gender Roles
Gender roles and sexuality
became flexible, and Eliot’s work reflected those changes. In the repressive Victorian era women were confined to the domestic sphere,
sexuality was not discussed or publicly explored, and a puritanical code regulated
social interactions. After Queen Victoria’s death there was an era of excess
and forthrightness, the Edwardian Age, which lasted until 1910. World War I further transformed
society, as people felt alienated from one another and empowered to break
social mores. Modernist writers and re-imagined masculinity and femininity not as
absolute identities dictated by society.
Eliot praised the end of the
Victorian era and expressed concern about the freedoms of the modern age, and the
feelings of emasculation experienced by many men as they returned home from
World War I to find women empowered by their new role as wage earners. The Waste Land portrays rape, prostitution, a conversation
about abortion, and non reproductive sexuality, though uncontrolled sexuality
is disdainful. The poem’s central character, Tiresias, is a hermaphrodite
embodying wholeness, his powers of prophesy and transformation are, due to his
male and female genitalia.
Fragmentation
The motif of fragmentation points
out the chaotic state of modern existence and juxtaposes literary texts against
one another; Eliot represented humanity’s damaged psyche and the modern world
with its sensory perceptions by collaging bits and pieces of dialogue, images,
scholarly ideas, foreign words, formal styles, and tones within one poetic work, echoes and
references that are just fragments, since Eliot includes only parts of texts
from the canon.
Mythic and
Religious Ritual
In his notes Eliot explains
the role played by religious symbols and myths. He drew from ancient fertility
rituals, in which the fertility of the land was linked to the health of the
Fisher King, a wounded figure who could be healed through the sacrifice of an
effigy. The Fisher King is linked to the Holy Grail legends, in which a knight has
to find the grail, the only object capable of healing the land. Ritual fails to
heal the wasteland, even as Eliot presents alternative religious possibilities.
Infertility
Eliot envisioned the modern
world as a wasteland, in which neither the land nor the people could conceive,
and various characters of The Waste Land are
sexually frustrated or dysfunctional, unable to cope with reproductive and
nonreproductive sexuality: the Fisher King represents damaged sexuality, Tiresias
represents confused or ambiguous sexuality, and the women chattering in “A Game
of Chess” represent an out-of-control sexuality.
Water
In Eliot’s poetry water symbolizes life and death, with the regenerative
possibility of restoring life and fertility, but it can also lead to drowning
and death.
Music and Singing
Like most modernist writers,
Eliot was interested in the divide between high and low culture, which he
symbolized using music. He believed that high culture, including art, opera,
and drama, was in decline while popular culture was on the rise. In The Waste Land, Eliot blended high culture with low.
Music is another way in which Eliot collages and references books from past
literary traditions.
